The Encryption Ritual

Two performers read a prepared script to each other, text built from a private conversation between a parent and a child making plans to end a pregnancy. Conversations like this one have been extracted from messaging platforms and handed to law enforcement, becoming evidence in criminal prosecutions. This piece doesn't reproduce any real conversation. It responds to the pattern: a private exchange, never meant to be read by anyone else, made legible to the state because the channel it traveled through wasn't built to keep it private.

Each performer's voice ran live through an encryption program built with my collaborator Gage Jones, scrambling what the audience heard. The performers themselves heard each other clearly, through headphones, on a channel that stayed open between them so the reading could shift as they see fit, depart from the page, adapt in the moment, in ways only the two of them would ever know. Afterward, each performer thoroughly destroyed their physical script.

Underneath the whole performance ran a musical cipher, a short sequence of notes spelling out a word tied to the ritual. The key was never published, though a musically literate ear might still recognize it. Even if the script had somehow survived, or the encryption had somehow been broken, the cipher was one more layer of the performance built to resist being fully recreated by anyone but the participants of this ritual.